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Frontiers in Optics

Scan-free direct measurement of an one-million-dimensional photonic state

Zhimin Shi, Mohammad Mirhosseini, Jessica Margiewicz, Mehul Malik, Freida Rivera, Ziyi Zhu, Robert W. Boyd

Published Jan 1, 2015• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We describe a technique that directly measures a pure quantum state of arbitrary dimensions with a single setting of the measurement apparatus. We demonstrate our method by measuring a million-dimensional photonic spatial state.
DOI
10.1364/fio.2015.fw4d.6

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Retrieving the vast amount of information carried by a photon is an enduring challenge in quantum metrology science and quantum photonics research. The transverse spatial state of a photon is a convenient high-dimensional quantum system for study, as it has a well-understood classical analog as the transverse complex field profile of an optical beam. One severe drawback of all currently available quantum metrology techniques is the need for a time-consuming characterization process, which scales very unfavorably with the dimensionality of the quantum system. Here we demonstrate a technique that directly measures a million-dimensional photonic spatial state with a single setting of the measurement apparatus. Through the arrangement of a weak measurement of momentum and parallel strong measurements of position, the complex values of the entire photon state vector become measurable directly. The dimension of our measured state is approximately four orders of magnitude larger than previously measured. Our work opens up a practical route for characterizing high-dimensional quantum systems in real time. Furthermore, our demonstration also serves as a high-speed, extremely high-resolution unambiguous complex field measurement technique for diverse classical applications.
It is of great importance to determine an unknown quantum state for fundamental studies of quantum mechanics, yet it is still difficult to characterize systems of large dimensions in practice. Although the scan-free direct measurement approach based on a weak measurement scheme was proposed to measure a high-dimensional photonic state, how weak the interaction should be to give a correct estimation remains unclear. Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate a technique that measures a high-dimensional quantum state with the combination of scan-free measurement and direct strong measurement. The procedure involves sequential strong measurement, in which case no approximation is made similarly to the conventional direct weak measurement. We use this method to measure a transverse state of a photon with effective dimensionality of 65000 without the time-consumed scanning process. Furthermore, the high fidelity of the result and the simplicity of the experimental apparatus show that our approach can be readily used to measure the complex field of a beam in diverse applications such as wavefront sensing and quantitative phase imaging.